Animal invasion of refuse containers has long been a serious problem. As a result, there have been a great many attempts to solve the problem by trying to make refuse containers difficult or impossible for animals to open.
One dominant type of refuse container is particularly economical, durable, easy to store within a garage or adjacent a garage or other building, and easy to move (via included wheels) toward a street for manual or machine lifting of the container and dumping of its contents into a waste hauling truck. This type of refuse container typically has a plastic refuse bin with a plastic lid rotatably mounted to one side of the bin. An example of such a prior art container is shown in FIG. 1.
Because these types of refuse containers often must be capable of being (i) lifted manually or by one or more arms mounted to waste hauling truck, (ii) emptied by tilting of the container to cause its lid to open, and (iii) closed and returned to the street-side location, the lid of the containers typically must be free to rotate to an open position when the containers are set out to await emptying by a truck. This means that, while the containers sit waiting to be emptied, their openable lid is readily openable by animals, such as bears, coyotes, and others that can either open the container by merely rotating the lid to an open position or by knocking the container over and thus causing the lid to open or be readily opened by the animal.
One substantial solution to the problem of animal tampering is to store the refuse container in a building, such as a garage, at least until the morning of the day of trash pickup. This procedure, however, can be inconvenient for people who would much rather place the refuse container out some time the day prior to pickup or who would like to store the refuse container outside and exposed to possible access by animals.
There have been attempts to provide “animal-proofing” locking mechanisms for such containers. They have typically been one or more among cumbersome, complex, unreliable, and costly. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,198,087, 8,0983,088, 8,408,607 and U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 2017/0043950, 2017/0320667.
A very simple apparatus for trying to animal proof such a refuse container is disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2015/0090719. This apparatus consists of two U-bolts, with one mounted to the container bin sidewall and the other to the container lid, and a snaplock removably securable to each U-bolt spaced from the external periphery of the container.
One problem with this type of apparatus, however, is that the snaplock can be easily grasped by a strong animal and ripped off the plastic container. Even if not pulled off, the applicant believes that smarter animals, such as bears, will eventually figure out how to unlock the snaplock, or unknowingly unlock it, by merely pushing and pulling on the snaplock.
Further, the disclosed snaplock embodiments require that there must be sufficient play in the apparatus components to be able to move the snaplock vertically, to remove it from a U-bolt. (See FIGS. 3-6.) This means that the container lid is not secured to the upper edge of the container bin and can be easily separated from the bin upper edge—including by merely knocking over the container—to allow either dumping of contents through the semi-opened area or grasping of the semi-opened lid, such as by a bear, to bend the lid or rip it off the container bin.